"As the Trump administration dismisses global heating, the coastal city is getting on with becoming one of the most climate resilient in the world. Here’s how"
"Patrick Devine, a captain for Boston Harbor City Cruises, shows me on his phone the scenes here in September 2024. The water was ankle-deep outside the door to his office on Long Wharf, one of the US city’s oldest piers, obscuring the pavements and walkways, surging into buildings and ruining vehicles in the car parks. “It just gets worse and worse each year,” says Devine, who has worked here, on and off, since 1995. “I’ve gotten used to it, so it’s just knowing your way around it.”
Much of Boston has got used to this. Devine has his own supply of sandbags now, for example. Next door to his office is the Chart House restaurant – when Long Wharf flooded last September, customers merrily sat at outside tables, holding their feet above the waterline, as servers with black bin bags for trousers waded over to bring them their lunches. The restaurant’s floor level is lower than that of the wharf, so the water came up to knee level in some areas. “It’s just part of business,” says one waiter, as he points out how the plug sockets are all at waist height. The place has flooded three times in the year he’s worked here. “We just clean it up, squeeze it out, open the doors, dry it out. It is what it is.”
In Boston they call them “wicked high tides”, also known as king tides – when the moon is at its closest to the Earth and pulling in the same direction as the sun, creating a tide 60 to 120cm (2-4ft) higher than usual. Combined with rising sea levels, fiercer storms and higher precipitation, events like this are making the climate crisis a visible threat in the city. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boston experienced 19 days of flooding in 2024; it is expected to be similar this year. Unless things change, sea levels here are projected to be 20cm higher than 2000 levels by 2030, 46cm higher by 2050, and a metre or two higher by 2100."
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